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I wonder if it's how it was thought of ("the address of 1") when it was invented. As some people contributed heavily to both the C language and UNIX when they were invented, it's possible
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lgeorgetJun 19 '14 at 15:03

1

I might start using this one instead ;)
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goldilocksJun 19 '14 at 15:39

"Two to and one" ("to" being >) makes more logical sense to me than "Two and to one", which is what I might usually confuse it with. If you consider "and one" as a single noun (a place), it also makes grammatical sense in context, which is harder to do with "Two and to one" -- you'd have to consider "to one" a single noun, and it still would not make contextual sense.

My coworkers and I usually say "two is greater than one", because most of us don't always remember that stderr is file descriptor 2 and stdout is 1 (especially those new to unix/linux), so the other mnemonics about redirecting stderr don't really work. Only problem is, you still have to remember where the ampersand goes!